Here are two books about stone, one by a leading stonemason, the other by a stone lover with something of a New Age approach. One has a practical relationship with stone, the other more of a romantic attitude. You might characterise Simon Warrack’s book as the ‘sense’ to Wyl Menmuir’s ‘sensibility’.

Sense first. Monumental is an attractive volume that mingles autobiography with informed observation. It follows Warrack around the world – from Venice, where he discovers his vocation watching a young conservator at work on the finials of the Ponte della Paglia, to Canterbury, where he has a stint learning his craft at the cathedral. He also spends time in Rome, working on a much-needed restoration of the Trevi Fountain. Having draped black sheets over the whole fountain, ‘as if it were a sculpture by the American installation artist Christo’, in order to protect the stone from the ‘steady rain of coinage’, the team even held a dinner party in the (drained) basin. As his career develops, Warrack travels further afield, and we follow him to Cambodia – a country he falls in love with, despite narrowly escaping an encounter with an AK-47 – and Ethiopia; to the UAE, Lebanon and Zimbabwe.

The author has a deep knowledge of building with stone, which he conveys easily, without too much technicality. He is fascinated by mortar, by the different recipes used by the great Venetian architects, and pleased to discover that the lime mortar used on a 2,000-year-old temple in the UAE was